Why You Need to Interleave Practice

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

Say you’re learning how to calculate the area of shapes.

You got some rectangles, some triangles, some circles.

If you do 20 triangle problems in a row, then you already know which formula to use.

That step has basically already been done for you.

And so by problem 20, you feel great at triangles.

And you think you got it down pat.

But problem is that feeling is completely artificial.

You never really had to choose the formula.

You never really had to match the formula to the situation.

You just blindly, robotically applied the triangle area formula to triangles.

Now, if you do this instead, you mix all the shapes together. You’re not just doing all the rectangles, then all the triangles, then all the circles.

You’re mixing them up, you’re interleaving between them.

Do a triangle, rectangle, triangle, circle, circle, rectangle, triangle…

now you have to look at each problem and actually decide which formula applies and then correctly apply it.

And yeah, those problems are gonna feel much harder, but the only way to actually know something is to be able to retrieve it without context clues.

This teaser is distilled from the following posts, if you want to dive deeper:

• Cognitive Science of Learning: Interleaving (Mixed Practice)
• The Counterintuitive Nature of Effective Learning Strategies

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.